From Professors to Grandmas, Fashion Inspo is Everywhere

Fashion feeds on inspiration. From designers who create entire collections based on their travels to consumers who eat, breathe, and sleep the world of fashion, inspiration makes the fashion world go round. In today’s world, much of the inspiration we, as consumers, are getting is from fashion magazines and brands, along with the fashion side of Instagram and TikTok. And with this adoration of the fashion world comes a tendency to get stylistically inspired by a specific type of person: a young, chronically online person, usually a woman.

For many of us, a specific subset of women are the embodiment of all things fashion. This group, composed of a myriad of women, from content creators to models, is whom many of us look up to for much of our outfit inspo: if Kendall Jenner wore a red sweater, I want to wear a red sweater. Yet, as we obsess over what these women are wearing, we’re creating limits to what, or who, we seek inspiration from.

Courtesy of @allmymoodboards on TikTok

But what if we change our fashion field of view to include those who aren’t typically seen as ‘fashionable’? Most people we encounter in our everyday lives aren’t represented in fashion magazines and runway shows. They still wake up each morning and make a conscious decision to put on a certain outfit, but these efforts often go overlooked by mainstream media. For conventional fashion girlies, people outside the stereotypical realm of fashion are very much like NPCs - no one pays their ability to creatively construct an outfit any heed. Yet, the truth is that these people are very much fashionable. They concoct unique outfit combinations with flawless accessorizing - and if they were on the body of an influencer or model, they would be trendsetting.

Older people, in particular, are a group largely ignored and not given credit for their role in fashion. Take the example of an old man’s fashion: wool blazers, crisp button-down shirts, baggy trousers, and leather loafers. Isn’t this very much the style of many young men and women today? TikTok users have taken this style and boxed it into the old money aesthetic or the quiet luxury trend. As a consequence, we now mostly associate such outfits with the influencers and models behind those aesthetics, not paying any attention to the old men around us who have been rocking those outfits for decades.

Traditionally, older women have also been forgotten by fashion. Fashion has very much become a young person’s craft. And there are major double standards when it comes to who gets to set trends. While young people, especially Gen Z, are making pieces cool and stylish, anything that older people wear is automatically aged and outdated. For instance, at one point, TikTok users would almost certainly shun a millennial for wearing ballet flats a few months ago: how cheugy! But now that all the cool girls on social media are wearing ballet flats, they are all the rage.

By making fashion so exclusionary and restricting our sources of inspiration, we’re only hurting ourselves. If the vast majority of people we look up to for fashion guidance are famous models or influencers with millions of followers, our ideals for fashion often become unattainable. We become sheep, enamored by the stylistic choices of revered fashion idols, and we try our best to copy their style. Through this, much of our individuality gets lost, and we end up forgetting what our own personal style is.

Fashion is everywhere. It’s in the seemingly plain shirt-and-pant combo your professor wears. It’s in the overalls and hat the men at the construction site have on. It’s in the trench coats and skirts that fit the grandmas on the street like a glove (you can’t tell me that the fashion girlies wouldn’t be obsessing over their outfits if Zara was selling them). We must fight our biases to like any outfit just because it’s worn by a young, pretty woman. As TikTok creator, @officialmacrose, discusses in her series titled ‘Style is Everywhere’, we need to separate the fashion from the person wearing it. We should try to look at the clothes themselves and decide what we like or don’t like about them: is the color combo particularly appealing? Is the outfit layered to perfection? Are there any fun accessories that stand out? This is the path to forming your own personal style, one that doesn’t ebb and flow with the trends.

Courtesy of @officialmacrose on TikTok

Courtesy of Reddit

By beginning to look at the world around them for influence, people will be inspired to uncover their own unique style. Perhaps they’ll see a businessman’s loafers and notice how much they love the shoe, or they’ll spot a librarian in a pencil skirt and recognize their appreciation for a tailored skirt. In the end, growing the array of people we get our fashion inspiration from will only add creativity to it. 

Featured image courtesy of Vintage Dancer